Let’s start in January 2001 and thwart the 9/11 attacks by having Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz heed Richard Clarke’s warnings about Al Qaeda. The game starts off well. Al -Qaeda is preemptively decapitated, its leaders rounded up in a series of covert operations and left to the tender mercies of their home governments. President Bush gets to focus on tax cuts, his first love.What are these "murky details" that topple governments and presidents? Nobody's cared that about murky US covert operations in the past. What's so magical about these details that they topple governments that would presumably otherwise be stable or repressive enough to survive? Why wasn't it possible to carry out these operations using the non-government-toppling murky techniques of the past?
But then, three years later, the murky details of this operation surface on the front page of The New York Times. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, denounces the “criminal conduct” of the Bush administration. Liberal pundits foam at the mouth. Ordinary Americans, unseared by 9/11, are shocked. Osama bin Laden issues a fierce denunciation of the U.S. from his Saudi prison cell. It triggers a wave of popular anger in the Middle East that topples any regime seen as too close to Washington.
When it comes to examining the consequent of a historical counterfactual, like most historians Ferguson implicitly embraces the view that what is involved is always and only an act of imagination. The difference between plausible and implausible counterfactuals might be thought to be a function of the degree to which we are able to discipline our imagination, and there is a case to be made that one of the effects of being a good (and specialized) historian is that one's imagination is just so disciplined. But even if we do that, can such imaginings be anything more than an aid to the historian in the context of discovery, doing no more than functioning in the construction of claims that must themselves still be settled by evidence?I think Bunzl is pointing to what seems bizarre and questionable in the kind of counterfactual yarn-spinning we see here: as soon as Ferguson leaves the actual events behind, he seems to feel free simply to make up an amusing story, without much discussing how or why that story came to seem probable to him, what rules and inferences suggested it (which should've been the real subject for discussion).
Also, I can't imagine a stupider criticism of counterfactual history than calling it "speculative". Of course it is; that's exactly the point.I don't know all this alternative history stuff annoys me because really there's no way to know what would have happened.
Any hope that Tina Brown might have learned something from her debacle at the New Yorker was pretty much dashed when she kept Ferguson on when she took over Newsweek.Yeah, I've seen this guy on TV. He seems to basically spout beltway elite platitudes.
According to Ferguson, Britain should have stayed out of World War I and allowed Imperial Germany to smash France and Russia and create a continental empire from the Atlantic to the Middle East.And then Britain, which wouldn't have been devastated by two world wars, would have been best buds with the Greater German Empire because George V and the Kaiser were cousins, and those bloody upstarts across the pond could just fuck off. (Tsar Nicholas II was also a cousin of George's, of course.) Wow. I mean... wow.
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posted by Renoroc at 7:50 AM on September 6, 2011 [77 favorites]